Junior NLP Data Scientist

About the role

The Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia is hiring a full‑time Junior NLP Data Scientist to support an interdisciplinary AI research program in psychiatry and supportive cancer care. Working under the supervision of Dr. John‑Jose Nunez and collaborating with BC Cancer, the role focuses on developing NLP and machine learning tools to improve patient psychosocial health.

Key responsibilities

• Help design and develop predictive and generative NLP pipelines using clinical data.
• Assist with front‑end and back‑end engineering for digital health applications.
• Build and maintain secure, scalable cloud infrastructure for deploying AI models (e.g., AWS).
• Research state‑of‑the‑art techniques in NLP, machine learning, and ethical AI.
• Collaborate with physicians, patients, developers, and researchers to co‑design and evaluate clinical tools.
• Support preparation of peer‑reviewed manuscripts, conference abstracts, grant proposals, ethics submissions, and other scientific documentation.
• Coordinate student software developers and liaise with research assistants.

Required profile

• Undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline with at least one year of related experience (or equivalent education/experience).
• Demonstrated commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, respecting diverse perspectives.
• Ability to work under supervision of principal investigators and collaborate with multidisciplinary teams.

Required skills

• Python programming
• NLP libraries such as Hugging Face, spaCy, NLTK
• Machine learning frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Pandas
• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and Docker containerization